Jazz Jackrabbit 2 Online

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Meh. D=

Your remixes are very good, Danyjel. I enjoyed this one a lot. The only thing I really dislike about this is that it starts out really slow – it takes a while to “get into” the song. Giving up is never a good thing… keep making remixes.

I don’t really have time for a long review, but I’d also like to say congratulations on getting the 3,500th upload. ;-)

Review time!

Starting off with the layout, it could be much better, but its still decent. The level consists of ten or so medium sized platforms. While platformy layouts usually aren’t a good thing, AEaeUO did a nice job here. For the most part, the platforms seem to flow together smoothly. There are, however, a lot of things about the layout that I dislike. Firstly, I think the full energy area is way too hard to get to. I also think that this level is somewhat Spaz biased (most platformy levels are, to be honest). There are also several places where I wouldn’t mind seeing springs, for example, the very bottom right of the level. As a plus, there are team based routes. There are triggered walls added near both bases that benefit the team defending that base by making the route to it much shorter and more efficient.

There are a number of suckers tubes inside the platforms that help navigation a lot. The problem is, though, there is no indication that they’re there. Once you’re aware of where they all are, though, you’ll dominate in this level greatly. I would’ve liked to see arrows or something where the sucker tubes are; this way you wouldn’t have to memorize so much stuff.

The minute I saw this level, Diamondus Warzone immediately came to mind. A lot of aspects seem to be borrowed from it. There’s the full energy area, which is essentially a hollow rectangle floating casually in the main part of the level. It contains three crates of ammo (bouncers, freezers, and RF missles, respectively), and a full energy carrot. It can only be accessed by a warp, and can only be exitted by a warp. Nextly, there’s an area at the bottom of the level where there is a plateau. You can run under the plateau and collect electroblasters, and you can also stand on top of it.

Moving on to the eyecandy, it is pretty decent, but, like the layout, could be better. The tileset is somewhat limiting, so rating too harshly on the level’s overall appearance wouldn’t be fair. Nevertheless, though, there are some aspects of the eyecandy that I absolutely adore. For example, as Violet called it, there’s a wonderful abstract cow. If you look at the bottom left of the level, some cave tiles in the foreground make up what appears to be a bull’s head. Look under the bull’s head and you’ll see a tile bug, though. I suppose the background is good enough, but I wouldn’t have minded if there was more there. There are two background layers; one consists of a series of interconnected vines, and the other is made up of a mountain range, with pillars sticking out of it. Layer 8 looks fine. It fades to a pleasant, dark blue color. Some areas of the level make good use of lighting effects; namely the areas around the bases. There’s also a good amount of moth events scattered around, which, as always, can enhance a level’s overall feeling greatly. While I would’ve liked to see some more eyecandy in the foreground and on the grass (flowers, etc.), the overall appearance of this level is pretty good. As for major bugs, I only found one: if you jump in the small area behind layer three above the toaster powerup room, you can see your ears.

The item placement here is interesting enough. If normal ammo wasn’t enough, AEaeUO included things like fastfeet, stopwatches, extra lives, and a variety of foods. As for ammo, you can find every type in the game here. However, the only weapons that get the honor of having their respective powerups added in are blasters, bouncers, and toasters. There’s one normal carrot, and one full energy carrot. The +1 carrot is sort of hard to find due to the layout, and is guarded by a text message condemning me as Ted. As for general placement, it is pretty good. Ammo crates and barrels are a bit overdone, however. Lag might be a problem here if there are too many players.

As for my closing thoughts, this level is good. There are some comical text events here, too (would’ve been nicer if “vanish” was set on them so you didn’t have to read them over and over again). The music choice is great. This level gets a download reccomendation from me.

Final rating: 7.2
Overall pros: Nice flow, good eyecandy.
Overall cons: Somewhat lacking layout, surplus text events.
Overall cnidarians: Alaska.

Yes, all typos made by Spotty were completely intentional. If you’ve ever talked to him on MSN, you’d know. ;-)

[test edit. ignore me. ~cooba]

Bjarni: To update to version 1.23, download and install this file: http://www.jazz2online.com/J2Ov2/downloads/info.php?levelID=572

I apologize for being off-topic.

Time to review!

In very early versions of JJ2, even before v1.00, Diamondus looked much different. Only two screenshots of the old Diamondus have been released, as well as a portion of it left in the current version of Diamondus. Pyromanus took what little resources he had and turned them into a fully usable tileset.

This tileset includes everything the original Diamondus had to offer, and more. Some of the new stuff includes ground without grass, slopes with varying angles, easier-to-work-with cave tiles, a good amount of blocks, waterfalls, and animated gems. If that wasn’t enough, Pyro went above and beyond what most tileset makers do and made event compatibility great. (This calls for a checklist!)

Textured background in 16bit – Yes! Pyromanus created a new textured background rather than using the old one. It works flawlessly.

Textured background in 8bit – Yes! Something you don’t often see these days.

Carrotus pole – Yes! Although I probably wouldn’t want to use it. It’s dark brown colored with tannish moss.

Diamondus pole – Yes! Looks great.

Jungle pole – Yes! It’s a fairly light green color, and looks better than most jungle poles you see do.

Psych pole – Yes! Looks great.

Small tree – Yes! Looks perfect.

8bit water – Yes! Looks perfect. Pyromanus even took the extra step and made the water red in the Hell version, so it looks like lava.

Snow – No… but I suppose it gets the job done. As it was in the default Diamondus sets, the snow here is green.

500 bump – Yes! Looks great, but the 500 is kind of hard to read in the night version.

Pinball paddles – Yes! They look great.

Carrot bump – Yes! I don’t like the colors all that much, but it still works.

Moving on to the masking, it is fairly flawless. The masking on the background trees is a bit jagged at parts, but I really doubt anybody’s going to use those trees in layer four anyway, so I won’t take off any points for it. Besides, the thin parts of the trees, which were the ones I thought looked a bit jagged, are meant to be one wayed anyway, so getting stuck shouldn’t be too much of a problem.

The two most major things added are animated gem stones and waterfalls. The waterfalls look magnificent, but if I were making a level with this (which I probably will), I’d probably leave the gemstones unanimated, unless the feel of the level was cartoony, or something. Naturally, a gem stone would look much more realistic if it were not moving. Nevertheless, the extra step of adding all these animated gems can only improve your rating from me.

The example levels look good, and the tile placement is very user-friendly. Pyromanus also included several palette edits, including Gardens, Night, Midnight, and Lava. The Gardens gives the set a… well… “gardenny” feeling. (if the word gardenny didn’t exist before, it does now.) The lava edit gives the tileset a Hellish feeling, a lot like the Thermal K1 edit of Carrotus. The midnight set gargantually darkens everything including sprites, while the night version takes after the classic green-on-purple night version included in the newer version of Diamondus. Rumor has it there will be another edit released in the future, too. ;-)

I suppose that should be enough. You really ought to be downloading this tileset and making a level with it, not reading my review. But thanks for reading my review anyway, even if you just skipped everything and looked at the bottom part.

-LAbRaTkiD

Well, I don’t have time for a long review, but I’d just like to say, this remix is very good, although a bit long.

Nice instrument choice, great percussion… I highly reccomend downloading this. Good job, Danyjel. :)

Jarno, this level was created for Razz Arena, a mod for Quake III Arena. I’ll tell you a secret, though, rename the .pk3 part to .zip and you can look inside and find buried treasure!

Fearofdark: This file must be a .pk3, not a .zip, or else Quake III Arena will not recognize it as a compatible file. What I was trying to say was that .pk3 files are basically just .zip files with different file extensions. You can extract them with a program such as Winzip to view the contents. Extracting this .pk3 and trying to use it with Quake III Arena, or God forbid JJ2, isn’t reccomended.

You included Exoticus three times, and Candion twice. I guess this is kind of useful to have on J2O, but all these files are on Monolith’s server, anyways.

I agree with AcId, it’s a good song, but I would’ve used a larger variety of instruments so it didn’t all run together.

I beta tested this, too, face.

Apocalyptic Afterworld, by Magoo, uses Mirrow’s overlooked Wisetyness tileset. The gameplay is nice. Fairly smooth flow for the most part, and the bases seem balanced enough. Some of the springs with keep x set seem to throw the flow off a bit, though. It’s hard to set them up just right, after all. The seeker powerup annoys the hood out of me, though. More specifically the sucker tubes leading to it. They seem to take too long to get there, with the warp and all. Floatups are used to help the flow in some areas as well. There are, however, some assorted areas where jumping is required, which is always good.

As always, Magoo managed to make the level look very attractive, although I don’t like how some of the bricks are translucent. I like the ambient lighting effects a lot, and the lightning in the background is nice (Xargon style). As always, though, if you’re going to have several non-tiling animations right next to eachother, you should make an extra animation with a different sync than the ones next to it. The areas where fire is placed in a horizontal line look kind of unnatural. Layer 6 and 7.. well, confuse me. There’s some ground soil and trees in layer 6, while in layer 7, there are metal platforms which are much bigger than the soil.

The ammo placement is good enough. The thing that caught my eye about it was how Magoo made nice designs with it; for example, a cross made out of toaster ammo.

As for the other stuff in the level… well, I personally think that the music isn’t all that good, nor fitting. It also has an invalid next level setting. It tries to loop to Apocalyptic Afterworld.j2l, but there’s no such thing.

Overall, this level gets an 8.3 and a download reccomendation.

I’m just going to take my review from my newspost and put it here.

The first custom JJ1 level ever released is finally here. Violet CLM’s Escape from Nippius starts you out in a room with several other green rabbits with big guns. There are some extremely original things in this level. I’ve never seen anything like some of this. Walls that shoot blaster shots at you, birds that fly freely for eyecandy, teleporters, and more inhabit this level. There’s even a custom end boss, more specifically a snowman with jumping capabilities.

The gameplay plays a lot like the default JJ1 levels, so there aren’t too many problems here. The eyecandy is very nice as well. There are some very clever things done with it. I especially enjoyed the translucency effect with the ice crystals.

My only complaint with this level is that I would’ve liked if it were a little bit longer. I highly recommend this level to anyone with JJ1 whose looking for a new level to play. It’s well worth the download. I want to warn you, though, this level is extremely difficult. It might even be a little bit harder than Orbitus 2, or Raneforus 2. In any case, that’s the way JJ1 levels should be. The harder the better.

Some people got out of memory errors when beta testing, too. I never had a problem myself, though. Just close JJ2 and then open it again, and see if that works. It’s a big level – 425×64.

CONGRATULATIONS!!!!!!!

This level has the honor of recieving my 500th review! I chose this level to review simply because I was in no mood to write out a long review. (July 4th, 2004).

Anyway, this level shows no effort whatsoever. Anyone who has played it would know. It’s a very classic level, right up there with Voldard’s Cool Treasure Jungle. Download reccomendation just to laugh at how dumb this level is. The level is simply just a bunch of random tiles put down. You get stuck a lot, and it has no signs of gameplay at all.[This review has been edited by labratkid]
(Size reduction due to table break. ~Violet)

NON PROOFREAD REVIEW ALERT!!!

Not a bad level at all. I’m going to mash all the reviewing areas together this time. All people usually really care about is gameplay and eyecandy, anyway.

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Gameplay – Decent
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Not bad at all. The flow is good enough, although there are one or two bugs here and there, and the level seems to work nicely for the most part. One of my biggest complaints is that the sucker tubes are extremely slow. It’d be nice if they were sped up a bit. I usually use a speed of 10 (or -10) minimum. Setting it to 10 makes it transport people exactly as fast as Jazz and Spaz can run at full speed. Another complaint is that the level seems very, very crampt (or is it cramped? Either way). It’s also kind of evil when you put a slope leading to a 90 degree angle (more specifically, a wall), and the wall has a floor right above it. It’d be much more convinient if you just stuck with one slope in those places, or perhaps even experimented with a floatup event. Position 45, 32 is one example of a place like this that bothers me. Another bothersome place is position 31, 28. A jagged edge like that makes you prone to getting stuck, and a one way event on the ledge hanging out there would be nice, anyway. Same with position 15, 23, but a one way event wouldn’t quite work there. Right in that area, first of all, there’s a jagged edge, and second of all, it’s very inconvinient for Jazz, who has to uppercut to get up to the ledge above there. Also, the whole bottom part of the level just annoys me. It’s confusing, evil, and it just annoys me.
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Pros: Decent flow, gets the job done.

Cons: Not too much space, some issues, Spaz biased.
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Eyecandy – Poor
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The level’s appearance is lacking to begin with, but a lot of parts are just downright confusing. Some of the bricks that are meant for layer four are used in layer four, while others are used in layer five, to make up caves of some sort. While this is original and all, it’s confusing when you want to know what’s in layer four and what’s in layer five (in other words, what can be walked through and what can not). Many of the brick tiles are misused, too. Many of the edges of blocks of bricks don’t have the proper edge tiles, i.e. The waterfalls in the foreground are annoying, and get in the way. The background is very, very ugly. The level also suffers from upwards rain syndrome. When you jump, or are moving up for any other reason (sucker tubes, etc.), the rain (if it is rain) moves up as well. I’m not sure if it’s supposed to be rain, so I won’t take off anything. Oh, and I almost forgot the text events… they’re EXTREMELY annoying. Almost anywhere you go, there’s another text event that pops up on your screen. I usually limit my levels to a secret text event that says some inside joke or another, a credits text event, and a hidden text event saying who beta tested the level. I put the Vanish setting on all of them, so they can only be viewed once by each person until the level is reset.
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Pros: I’ve seen worse.
Cons: Ugly, confusing, and full of irrelevant text events.
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Overall – Not bad
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This level isn’t bad at all. It’s not the best sized level there is, and it’s very ugly, but the gameplay is pretty decent. I wouldn’t host this or anything, but it’s not bad. No big download reccomendation, but it’s not something I would stay away from.
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Pros: Decent.
Cons: Not all that good.
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These are awesome, make more levels. My number one suggestion is to not put so much confusing eyecandy in the foreground. Some savepoints would also be nice.

R3ptile, you can see the background I used in the example level several times. In the level there are occasional “splits” in the bricks where you can see layer 8 through them. Also, putting the black tiles in layer 8 would make it so they were all unmasked, and would possibly mess up the level. Feel free to look at my level in JCS if you need help; there’s no password.

Mods can not be created without a source code. This isn’t a mod.

This is simply amazing… it’s seriously just about PERFECT. The only part that dissapointed me is that there are no ‘slides’ in it, but AFAIK, .mid’s can’t do slides. With that behind, this is one of the most amazing things I’ve ever heard, especially considering the author is young.

There isn’t exactly all that much to say about this, as it’s a song, and I can’t really think of anything that’s bad about it, so I’m just gonna go with a short review. This 9.2 I’m giving this might even be underrating.

Download reccomendation: You bet.

Hmm… all these Crysilis requests. Spaztic wanted me to do Crisilis as well. I just might try it some time in the near future.

I’ll edit this review for commenting on future reviews on this.

Comments on Violet’s and Blacky’s reviews:
I was originally going to do the sucker tubes similar to the way CelL did them in his conversion, but I felt that if I did, it’d be way too unoriginal, so I experimenting by using simple gradients for tubes.[This review has been edited by labratkid]